After a summer’s worth of hard work you’re handed a final check. You receive your pay stub in the mail, and flabbergasted, you realize you don’t understand any of the information on it. 18 years and a diploma later, yet still no comprehension of a document every adult receives.
Lifeskills are vital for surviving in this “real world” post-graduation that many tend to speak of. Yet, these skills that many expect us to have are not taught to us. Instead of continuing this trend, leading more students to this path of struggle, schools can incorporate these lessons into their current curriculum.
Students struggle to hold a conversation, write a proper email, cook their own meal or even understand their pay stub. These are the basics, must know abilities. Young adults can not go out into the working world being unadapted to the things they will quickly experience. This causes them to fall behind and potentially have more stress. This happens because schools don’t teach kids; they just expect us to know, but how would one know if someone isn’t teaching them? Schools need to begin incorporating basics to create strong young professionals.
Research from the Sutton Trust reveals that 96 percent of teachers think life skills are as or more important than formal academic qualifications in determining how well young people do in adulthood. When the teachers believe this, yet there is no change in curriculum, it is nothing but clear that something needs to be shifted. I believe that to solve this issue of lacking life skills can be solved within the time already given, rather than having to create additional classes.
A proposed solution would include units in classes that involve real-world application. This could be seen as adding a unit in your math class. This would mean in your math class, including a short unit at the end of the year about taxes and W-2 reports, or even in English, learning how to compose professional emails and create concise resumes. If you begin to blend the topic straight along with the life skill, you can create an environment in which you learn very important information for difficult professions while simultaneously learning skills that you will use day to day. The perfect time to implement these additions would be at the end of the school year, after AP testing, since there is additional free time.
As teenagers, it seems that we are expected to know how to be adults. But not everyone has resources from adults to learn these “survival skills.” So there is an extra importance in making sure that this information is widely available to all. Hopefully resulting in more confident young adults who can thrive on their own.
